Revolution News, Vol. 9: change of venue

Father's Day was the most recent of these, so we're overdue for an update.

After the pair appeared at the joint rally, the Guardian asked Sanders supporters: what now?

We received 375 responses on readers’ plans for their November vote. And despite the show of solidarity with Clinton on Tuesday, Sanders’ fans aren’t all convinced the presumptive Democratic nominee is who they will now support: Green party nominee Jill Stein was the most popular among reader respondents, with 171 new supporters, more than double the number who said they would move their support to Clinton.

A write-in vote for Sanders was also a popular option, with just 20 respondents opting for Trump. These results aren’t necessarily a representative sample, and they differ significantly from a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday, which found that 85% of Sanders supporters intended to vote for Clinton.

 

How Bernie Sanders supporters plan to vote in November

Source: Guardian | Graphic: Jan Diehm/The Guardian

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171/375 = 45.6%, so this anecdotal survey indeed produces a wildly different result from Pew's recent scientific poll, also referenced yesterday in an update and linked via The Guardian in the third graf above.  What to make of such a vast discrepancy?  What you like.  For now, it's just another data point.

"Donations to Stein campaign increase exponentially":

Since Tuesday morning, the Green Party has received over $80,000 in contributions, over half of which comes from first-time donors, and half of which comes in the form of contributions under $50. Tellingly, about 615 of those contributions totalled $27, the exact number commonly trumpeted and solicited by the Sanders campaign during his revolutionary grassroots funding movement.

“There’s been an explosion of Berners coming in through every portal of the campaign, and it’s really exciting,” Stein told US Uncut in a phone interview. “There is so much courage out there to stand up to the marching orders handed down by the usual suspects.”

Stein’s social media accounts have also seen tremendous growth and engagement in the past 24 hours. A recent livestream posted to the Stein campaign’s Facebook page has been viewed over 300,000 times in less than a day. Her page itself has added approximately 44,000 new likes in the past week. Her Twitter account has over 145,000 followers as of this writing, increasing by the tens of thousands just this week, with 5.6 million impressions on July 12-13 alone. There have also been 10,000 new signups for her email list since yesterday.

And according to web traffic ranking site Alexa, Jill2016.com has been climbing steadily in popularity since January, with rapid monthly growth since March. The search term “Jill Stein” has also seen a hockey-stick increase on Google Trends since the endorsement:

Duopolists will scoff at the $80K figure, but will probably be swallowing a little harder the next time they look at a quarterly campaign finance report.  The ultimate goal for the next 60 days or so remains; 15% in the national polling, leading to Stein's inclusion in the presidential debates, the schedule for which was announced this week (the first is slated for September 26).  In order to be in the debates, her name needs to be included in the polls.  Time is short.  You may petition the Commission on Presidential Debates for redress of this grievance at this site.

According to Stein’s website, her campaign has secured ballot access in 23 states and Washington, DC, and petition signatures are currently being collected for ballot access in 27 others. Stein said her campaign has “many irons in the fire” and will be on “90 to 95 percent” of ballots after petitions are delivered to various Secretaries of State.

In the end, despite being labeled as a “spoiler” candidate by Clinton supporters and staunch Democrats in a winner-take-all political system, Stein is optimistic about her chances if she’s able to communicate her message to a national TV audience at the general election debates.

[...]

“If that word gets out, that can be a very powerful motivator for those people to vote for my campaign, and that’s a plurality of votes.” Stein continued. “In the words of Alice Walker, ‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.'”

I can't say I'm overjoyed about HA Goodman's conversion, but here it is (apply the blind hogs and acorns rationale).

Fear is the ultimate weapon of establishment Democrats and people who want nothing more than for you to “fall in line.”

I’ll admire and respect Bernie Sanders forever, but I’ll never “fall in line” and vote for anyone advised by Henry Kissinger, or Bush’s neoconservatives. As Robert Kagan stated regarding Clinton’s foreign policy, “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue…it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Sorry, not voting for a Democrat with a “neocon” foreign policy.

Give Jill Stein a look, and give her platform serious consideration. Around half of Bernie voters according to Bloomberg in late June will never vote for Hillary; a far more accurate assessment in my view than recent claims of the majority flocking to Clinton.

Whatever the percentage of conversions happens to be, there's some serious momentum now for Stein, and one of many Berning Questions is how far can she take it.

Two out of three ain't bad

-- My timing was a few days off on Trump and Pence teaming up -- Il Douche whiffed by missing the chance to steal the news cycle yesterday from Hillary and Bernie -- but it looks as if I'll be right by Friday.  Pence, fresh from the tanning bed, delivered the line that will be repeated on an endless loop from now until the leaves fall off the trees.

"I think it would be extremely careless to elect Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States."

Let's observe that the Sheldon Primary has elected Newt Gingrich the vice-presidential nominee, so I'll surmise that's the last obstacle for the Orange-utan to overcome, thus the delay.

Some donors are pressuring Trump to pick Gingrich. A source close to Sheldon Adelson tells CNN that the casino magnate spoke to Trump and mentioned that "he liked Newt."

"Favoring is a more appropriate term," the source said of Adelson's conversation with Trump.

I do like my oligarchy with a skosh of plutocracy.

Update: This impulsive, unfortunate, regrettable insertion of herself into the election has me shaking my head at Justice RBG.  The crack about moving to New Zealand reveals her own unfounded fears of a Trump presidency.  Of all the people in the United States who are capable of relocating across the planet who will never actually do so (she's got one of the best jobs there is, and it's for life), Ruth Bader Ginsberg is signaling that she needs a Xanax and a glass of wine.  And somebody who can persuade her to stay away from picking fights with Drumpf.

Update II: Election Law Blog's Rick Hasen agrees.

With respect to recent polling, the swing states are closing up but there's no reason for worry.  This is predictable erosion from last week's non-indictment.  Trump is about to pick his running mate, the RNC is coming up, he's going to get some more bounces, maybe even move ahead of Clinton in the polling next week and almost certainly the week after.  That's how the presidential cycle goes; it happened in '08 right after McCain picked Palin.  He pulled into the lead.  Briefly.

I'll be blogging about the pants-crapping Democrats making themselves physically ill with worry about President Trump in the third and fourth weeks of this month, in-between conventions.  I'll link and mock every one.

There's nothing here to be concerned with, Nellies.  Yet.

-- The New Yorker's John Cassidy called Bernie's endorsement of Hillary 'fulsome'.  We're not actually as strong together as Mrs. Clinton's campaign is projecting.

There was that phrase again. Perhaps nobody had informed Clinton that “Stronger Together” echoes the slogan of the Remain side, which lost the recent Brexit referendum in the U.K. Or perhaps she didn’t care. With Sanders behind her and on message, one of the big challenges facing her campaign had been overcome. Now the task was to make sure that Sanders’s supporters received the message, even if that meant laying it on thick.

Berners showed up at the New Hampshire rally and left amid shouts of 'No!" and tears as Bernie choked the life out of his own political revolution.  It's going to be some time before these believers can reconcile their grief.  Today I would posit that of the choices left to them, not voting at all might be in the lead.  But then there's this, which suggests that most of the sheep are already herding themselves onto the bandwagon.

The financial markets, on the other hand, were much more enthusiastic.  They've been quickly shaking off Brexit -- that's another one I missed -- and rose to all-time highs in the days preceding yesterday, rising higher as the two Democrats spoke effusively of each other.  Oil is still losing ground on oversupply reports, however, so Houston's economy and conservatives will remain fearful about the future.

And speaking of ham-handed sales jobs, Barack Obama is also mistaken if he thinks we're not as divided as it seems.  We are in fact more so.   Be reminded that Obama lives in the same White House bubble that a clearly and publicly intoxicated George W. Bush (embarrassing himself once more) used to live in.



As for the outgoing chief executive, I seem to be immune to his silver-tongued entreaties at these final stages of his public service.  For the incoming one, it's a matter of not getting it and not caring to, and her husband -- his rapidly deteriorating political dexterity failing him -- seems too feeble to give her an assist.  In fact, he looks like that guy in the park with early-onset dementia, feeding the pigeons and trying to decide whether he should fill up his Always or wind his wristwatch.

Hey, I just thought of something: in order to deal with the crisis of ISIS, let's join them and transform them from within.  It certainly makes as much sense as Texas Democrats voting in the GOP primary, doesn't it?

-- Saving the most ignorant and deceptive for last ... Paul Ryan.

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan defended his decision to support Donald Trump Tuesday, disagreeing with the candidate on several issues but saying that refusing to back Trump amounts to supporting Hillary Clinton.

"It's a binary choice," Ryan told a skeptical voter at a CNN town hall Tuesday. "It is either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton — you don't get a third option. It's one or the other and I know where I want to go." 

Fingers in the third-party dikes, fingers in his ears.  The concept of a hell that burns everlasting was conceived in the minds of men who had to confront the demagoguery of charlatans like Ryan.

After a voter told Ryan he couldn't vote for Trump over what he called racism, Ryan responded: "That basically means you're going to help elect Hillary Clinton. And I don't think Hillary Clinton is going to support any of the things that you stand for if you're a Republican." 

Based on nearly every single post I have published for the past twelve months, it shouldn't surprise you that I can see right through the Speaker.  If you're falling for this line, then you will surely get no relief from your terror if you vote for Trump because you despise Hillary.  And vice versa.

No point in waking Ryan up with the smell of coffee brewing; he's not going to flinch if you threw a whole pot of it, boiling hot, in his face.

Don't be as stupid as Paul Ryan thinks you are.  Please.

-- Steven Colbert isn't joking when he says that Clinton is such a bad candidate that the only person she could defeat is Donald Trump.  She's one and done.  Whether she cracks the top five of worst presidents ever is in her hands.  She starts another war, she can probably knock out Calvin Coolidge for fifth place.

"Meh."

Seems like the reaction in aggregate.

-- The 'pro' or Clinton argument, from Nate Silver's shop.

Roughly 1 in 5 Sanders supporters say they are going to vote for a third-party candidate. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein combined for 22 percent of the vote among Sanders’s supporters in a recent NBC/WSJ survey and 21 percent in a recent Suffolk University survey. Johnson won 17 percent of Sanders backers in a Pew Research Center poll (the poll did not test Stein). The average third-party support among Sanders’s voters in the three surveys, 20 percent, is significantly higher than the 13 percent of all voters who say they’d back Johnson or Stein. (Younger voters, who voted for Sanders in overwhelming numbers in the primary, are also far more likely to say they’d choose a third-party option or “someone else,” according to these surveys and a new poll from the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.)

Keep in mind that historically, third-party candidates -- even those down the ballot in Texas -- can poll well running up to Election Day, but then fear takes hold and they leak that support back to the majors.  So how this trend holds is one I'll be watching closely.  Harry Enten again at 538.com.

But it’s also possible (and, I would argue, probable) that because Clinton and Trump are two of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time, third-party candidates are going to do better than usual. Johnson looks especially likely to peel votes from Clinton and Trump because he will probably achieve ballot access in all 50 states, which is unusual for a non-major-party candidate.

That’s part of the reason why FiveThirtyEight is including Johnson’s chances in these projections. We aren’t explicitly projecting Stein’s vote, in part because polls include her less often than they include Johnson, and in part because she probably won’t be on the ballot in some states. You’ll notice, however, that the projected vote shares for Clinton, Trump and Johnson usually don’t add up to 100 percent. (In Missouri, for instance, they sum to 98.7 percent.) That’s because the model reserves a small share for “other” candidates, including Stein, in states where we expect at least one of them to appear on the ballot.

(This is what Charles did back here -- scroll to the bottom -- and is an acceptable rounding method among pollsters and political scientists.)

-- The 'con' argument: Trump, Johnson and Stein all took today as the start of the campaign to begin wooing Sandernistas to their side.  It's downhill for Clinton from here, in two interpretations; one good and one bad.  Can she ride her sled all the way down without getting upset?  It's up to her now.  No excuses.

-- The satire.

The Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign announced plans for bumper stickers and t-shirts emblazoned with their candidate’s new slogan, “Meh.”

The slogan change comes on the heels of Ms. Clinton winning the endorsement of her fiercest and most stalwart Democratic primary challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Several Clinton camp staffers have told the press the slogan is meant to capitalize on the general feeling of apathy that they hope Sanders supporters will now feel toward the election, and that it will inspire them to accept the status quo as a “perfectly acceptable alternative to substantive change,” one aide told a newspaper in New Jersey.

The campaign also considered, “She Could Be Worse” and “Frankly, She’s Not Trump” as well as “She’ll Disappoint You Just The Same As Obama Did.” Other slogans that could still be unveiled by Team Clinton are, “She’s Like Bernie, For Now, Until She’s Not,” and “I Like Triangulating, Cynical Politicians Like Hillary!” Focus groups reportedly also tested well with the slogan, “I’ll Vote For Another Clinton In 20 Years Because Change Is Hard!”

“We understand that familial political dynasties are kind of the exact opposite of what the Founders probably had in mind,” Helen Sussman, Chief Deputy Assistant Media Liaison for the Clinton campaign, told reporters this morning, “but well, YOLO! Also, we have to just keep reminding you, she’s not Trump. And any time you feel sad about being force fed a milquetoast status quo sellout tool of the One Percent, just remember — she’s not Trump.”

Don't forget to mention the words 'spoiler' or Supreme Court' a few times either, like Bernie has repeatedly.  'First woman president', 'Ralph Nader' and 'siphoning votes' also still work well on the shallowest of thinkers.

It's going to be a long, hot summer.

I read the news today, oh boy

-- Hillary and Bernie will make a joint campaign appearance in New Hampshire.  Some are refusing to use the 'E' word, which is almost the most pathetic thing I have seen this cycle.  Some on the left -- the real actual left -- think the Democrats are pulling their act together.  Some don't.  I don't care either way.

The only question is what his support network does.

This news, to me, is what the Democratic Party is, was, and always will be.  A conservative Democrat (head of the DLC, founder of 'The New Democrats') leaves his party in the lurch by jumping out of the race for US Senate ahead of the 2010 Red Tea Tidal Wave, now wants his old job back after making millions as a lobbyist.  No. Thanks.

-- Some people are already feeling very threatened (on behalf of Hillary Clinton) by Jill Stein and the Green Party.  They really went the extra mile on the loathing part, too.

You know the old saw: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you ...

For the rest of the weak-kneed: Bernie is endorsing Clinton today, even if he cannot say so.  Unbunch your briefs, take a deep breath, resume more superior condescension.  You've got a real enemy, and it's standing to your right.  Your other right.

-- Trump will try to Bigfoot Clinton and Sanders by tapping his running mate, also later today.  The names most frequently mentioned have been Mike Pence, Newt Gingrich, and some retired general.

Doesn't matter; this is going to be a blowout.  Though if Pence is the choice, then Indiana should be fun to watch, like Ohio.

-- Obama, W. Bush, Biden, their wives, Ted Cruz, John Cornyn and some other Texas electeds in trouble with the law are in Dallas today for, you know, thoughts and prayers.  Greg Abbott spilled hot water on himself, so he's not coming.  Sending his wife.  I'll try to avoid every mention of this on social media today as well as in the future.

I think the one-year anniversary of Sandra Bland's arrest is a much more important occasion.  In that vein, I expect to see this win a Pulitzer:

Those cops dressed like that look like a fucking joke.

If you'd rather read about Pokemon Go taking over the world, or Amazon Prime Day, or anything like that then your news is elsewhere.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance mourns the Dallas Police Department's losses at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, and continues to support constructive solutions for our country's ongoing racial issues.  Here's the blog post roundup.

Off the Kuff notes some interesting aspects of national polls and how they relate to Texas.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos urges Democratic candidates to run as Democrats. Neo-liberalism and Republican-lite are not winnable options. A Gentle Reminder to Texas Democrats: Neoliberalism is not a winning solution.

The Texas Republican in charge of social services (isn't that a joke) shows the typical Republican disdain for women, their families and their health by offering mosquito repellent to fight off the Zika virus. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is disgusted.

July is presidential nominating conventions month and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has the lowdown on the Republicans, Democrats, and Greens (coming to Houston in August).

SocraticGadfly advises environmentalists not to get fooled by Exxon's head fakes on a carbon tax.

Texas Leftist speculates on Trump's brand of terror.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston recaps the Texas Department of Insurance's hearing on arbitration.

Asian American Action Fund writes about religion's impact on the 2016 election.

Egberto Willies had to call out a friend who has turned toward Trump.

The Lewisville Texan Journal takes note of the city's Animal Services event in coordination with the showing of "The Secret Life of Pets".

Neil at All People Have Value walked in the Sharpstown neighborhood of Houston with his sign regarding the value of everyday life. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Better Texas Blog begins prep work for the 2017 budget process, Erika Greider at Burkablog forewarns the 2017 Texas Legislature about the looming budget battles, and Eva DeLuna Castro places the blame for Texas' tightened budget where it belongs.

Juliet Stipech and Norma Torres Mendoza argue that comprehensive immigration reform is a matter of the United States’' continued economic prosperity.

Grits for Breakfast blogs about the Dallas police shootings as "changing everything"... or nothing.

Jim Hightower posits on police violence, Black Lives Matter, and populism.

Ashton Woods at Safety in Numbers tells Pride Houston they still have a problem.

The TSTA Blog applauds Hillary Clinton's promise to reduce the role of standardized testing in public schools.

Prairie Weather wants to know if Hillary is really in the clear.

Ty Clevenger at Lawflog points out that Clinton isn't the only person in government protected by a double standard.

Zachery Taylor compares Joe Biden's 'Cancer Moonshot' to Al Gore's claims of having invented the Internet.

The Rag Blog posts details about its 50th anniversary Rag Reunion and Celebration in the fall.